Re: <nettime> If Gaza Were Here

[David Garcia via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

- Kingdom Come – ‘Vibe Fascism’

“We [Fascists] don’t think ideology is a problem that is resolved in 
such a way that truth is seated on a throne […] The truth of an ideology 
lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and 
action.” A. Bertele, Aspetti ideologici del fascismo - Turin 1930

In late September 2025 a hundred and fifty thousand people heeded the 
call of far-right activist Tommy Robinson to gather in London for a 
so-called ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally. It was the largest ever 
demonstration instigated by the far right in recent British history. And 
one of many signals from around the world that the extreme right has 
moved from the social margins into the centre of our politics. When 
Timothy Leary, acid guru of the 60’s counterculture, was asked what we 
should do, once we had “turned-on, tuned-in and dropped-out”, he 
famously replied “find the others”. The ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march was 
the equivalent of a 60’s happening (more ‘hate in’ than ‘love in) 
another ’find the others’ moment in which a host of disparate local 
subcultures coalesced to form a genuine counterculture, inverting Andrew 
Breitbart’s oft quoted aphorism, as these days it is ‘culture is 
downstream from politics’.

There is a pressing need to better understand and account for the 
relentless rise of today’s far-right political movements, who appear to 
have become the new global counterculture. The original term 
‘counterculture’ described a new kind of mediatised relationship between 
politics and culture that emerged in the second half of the 20th century 
when small disparate ‘subcultures’ of artists, philosophers, 
revolutionaries and poets (existentialists, beats etc) coalesced into a 
movement that overturned the stultifying conformity of the 1950s, 
instigating “a philosophy of liberation that swept across post-war 
western societies. More than just a cultural trend it became a social 
movement so powerful it shaped institutions, technology, politics, 
business and the attitudes and aspirations of whole generations.”

The persistent belief of the left (that still has echoes) is that this 
coalition of disparate practices is intrinsically progressive. The 
counter-claim of today’s reactionary right is that it is THEY who are 
the new counterculture displacing the tired old progressive hegemon. 
Their starting point is the proposition that the generation of 
electorally successful politicians raised in the era of the post war 
progressive movements (the Clintons and Blairs etc) enabled a covert 
revolution, in which their progressive ideas –the so-called “woke mind 
virus”- were smuggled into our institutions, the universities, the 
media, the arts, social services, education, government and law, not 
through honest debate but through a stealthy process of institutional 
osmosis. This invisible orthodoxy is what new-right’s house philosophers 
such as Curtis Yarvin have dubbed the ‘cathedral’, or cultural Marxism 
or the deep state.

By adopting a rebel pose these new energised incumbents maintain power 
by playing the role of everlasting underdogs, taking on the progressive 
industrial complex, with its identity politics, its educators its 
elites. It is their success in instilling in their followers a sense of 
participating mass popular insurgency (whilst inadvertently dismantling 
their own democracy) is one of the factors that makes this movement so 
hard for the left to defeat.

The left leaning liberals are misguided in their belief that salvation 
can be found in either *fact checking* or even the delivery of material 
improvements alone (Deliveroo politics). To invert James Carville’s 
famous catchphrase its definitely not “the economy stupid”. Time and 
again people have shown themselves unafraid of voting against their own 
best economic interests. We are witnessing something as intangible as a 
fascist ‘vibe shift’.

But although we see what is unfolding there remains deep uncertainty 
about how to respond. Should we treat it as a resurgence of what we saw 
in the 1930s and organise in the way they did then to defeat the 
fascists? Or are we facing something completely new for which earlier 
tactics are of little use?.

Some on the liberal left remain ambivalent about acknowledging the 
threat. Four years ago, in a public forum I asked the English liberal 
journalist Andrew Maar whether it was time to start routinely calling 
out the new far right movements as fascist. He pushed back hard arguing 
that using the F word outside of a specific historical context was scare 
mongering and likely to backfire. “Fascism, from this perspective, was 
born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the 
same form.”

Maar had a point, but our response need not be binary. As Nigel Trilling 
argued recently today’s far right has both echoes the tendencies that 
gave rise to 20th century fascism AND is also something new. For 
Trilling fascism remains an indispensable term for a uniquely 
destructive force in politics, and one for which we don’t have a better 
word.” A word to for a reactionary mass movement that promised a 
national re-birth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and 
abroad. That sought to dismantle democracy. But unlike other forms of 
authoritarianism did that as part of a mass popular project. It sought 
to engage ordinary people in the dismantling of their own democracy.”

In an interview in 2009 Christopher Hitchens was eloquent and insightful 
on the struggle to resist the lure of fascism. He argued George Orwell 
resigned his commission in Bengali colonial police because he realised 
was in danger of becoming a sadist and a racist. “It’s a great help” 
Hitchens argues “if you’re going to become an anti-fascist, which is 
what Orwell later became, if you have some insight into the horrible 
psycho dramatic nature of fascism, the social warp that is part of it, 
the thrill of domination and the thrill of being dominated. […] in all 
of Orwell’s writing […] He knows immediately that there is something 
utterly wicked and pornographic about fascism that must be resisted. 
It’s a life and death question.”

The problematic nature of both Orwell and Hitchens as individuals 
reminds us that we can only use the word if we continuously acknowledge 
the fascism in ourselves. It means a daily reminder of Felix Guattari’s 
warning that the biggest challenge in fighting Fascism is that it seems 
to come from the outside’ whilst finding its energy right at the heart 
of everyone’s desire’.

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